Top 200 Michelle Alexander Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The “social pathologies” of the poor, particularly street crime, illegal drug use, and delinquency, were redefined by conservatives as having their cause in overly generous relief arrangements. Black “welfare cheats” and their dangerous offspring emerged, for the first time, in the political discourse and media imagery.”

— Michelle Alexander

102. “There is no doubt that if young white people were incarcerated at the same rates as young black people, the issue would be a national emergency.”

— Michelle Alexander

103. “Many will wonder how a nation that just elected its first black president could possibly have a racial caste system. But as discussed in chapter 6, there is no inconsistency whatsoever between the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land and the existence of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness. The current system of control depends on black exceptionalis,; it is not disproved or undermined by it.”

— Michelle Alexander

104. “Dealing with this system on its own terms is complicated by the problem of denial. Few Americans today recognize mass incarceration for what it is: a new caste system thinly veiled by the cloak of colorblindness.”

— Michelle Alexander

105. “In 1991, the Sentencing Project reported that the number of people behind bars in the United States was unprecedented in world history, and that one fourth of young African American men were now under the control of the criminal justice system. Despite the jaw-dropping impact of the “get tough” movement on the African American community, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans revealed any inclination to slow the pace of incarceration.”

— Michelle Alexander

106. “Drug use, once considered a private, public-health matter, was reframed through political rhetoric and media imagery as a grave threat to the national order. Jimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell show in their research how the media imagery surrounding cocaine changed as the practice of smoking cocaine came to be associated with poor blacks.35.”

— Michelle Alexander

107. “A mood of outrage and defiance swept the South, not unlike the reaction to emancipation and Reconstruction following the Civil War. Again, racial equality was being forced upon the South by the federal government, and by 1956 Southern white opposition to desegregation mushroomed into a vicious backlash.”

— Michelle Alexander

108. “Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.10 If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color.11 That is not what one would guess, however, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, which are over-flowing with black and brown drug offenders.”

— Michelle Alexander

109. “In every state across our nation, African Americans – particularly in the poorest neighborhoods – are subjected to tactics and practices that would result in public outrage and scandal if committed in middle-class white neighborhoods. In the drug war, the enemy is racially defined.”

— Michelle Alexander

110. “Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black or Latino.”

— Michelle Alexander

111. “One of the great tragedies of man’s long trek along the highway of history has been the limiting of neighborly concern to tribe, race, class or nation.”

— Michelle Alexander

112. “One Strike and You’re Out” policy requires every public housing lease to stipulate that if the tenant, or any member of the tenant’s household, or any guest of the tenant, engages in any drug-related or other criminal activity on or off the premises, the tenancy will be terminated.”

— Michelle Alexander

113. “In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern states to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely “rewarding lawbreakers.”

— Michelle Alexander

114. “Lyons sued the City of Los Angeles for violation of his constitutional rights and sought, as a remedy, a ban against future use of the chokeholds. By the time his case reached the Supreme Court, sixteen people had been killed by police use of the chokehold, twelve of them black men.”

— Michelle Alexander

115. “What this book is intended to do – the only thing it is intended to do – is to stimulate a much-needed conversation about the role of the criminal justice system in creating and perpetuating racial hierarchy in the United States.”

— Michelle Alexander

116. “The total of all drug-related deaths due to AIDS, drug overdose, or the violence associated with the illegal drug trade, was estimated at 21,000 annually – less than the number of deaths directly caused by drunk drivers, and a small fraction of the number of alcohol-related deaths that occur every year.”

— Michelle Alexander

117. “Reagan’s promise to enhance the federal government’s role in fighting crime was complicated by the fact that fighting street crime has traditionally been the responsibility of state and local law enforcement. After a period of initial confusion and controversy... the Justice Department announced its intention to cut in half the number of specialists assigned to identify and prosecute white collar criminals and to shift its attention to street crime, especially drug-law enforcement.”

— Michelle Alexander

118. “Decades of cognitive bias research demonstrates that both unconscious and conscious biases lead to discriminatory actions, even when an individual does not want to discriminate.”

— Michelle Alexander

119. “As James Madison put it, the nation ought to be constituted “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”

— Michelle Alexander

120. “The nonprofit PEW Charitable Trusts reports that inmate populations in at least ten states are expected to increase by 25 percent or more between 2006 and 2011.”

— Michelle Alexander

121. “African Americans and Latinos in the plea bargaining process; in fact, “at virtually every stage of pretrial negotiation, whites are more successful than nonwhites.”64.”

— Michelle Alexander

122. “By 2008, the NYPD was stopping 545,000 in a single year, and 80 percent of the people stopped were African Americans and Latinos. Whites comprised a mere 8 percent of people frisked by the NYPD, while African Americans accounted for 85 percent of all frisks.”

— Michelle Alexander

123. “Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born.”

— Michelle Alexander

124. “It is this failure to care, really care across color lines, that lies at the core of this system of control and every racial caste system that has existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world.”

— Michelle Alexander

125. “Church? I wouldn’t dare tell anyone at church.”77 Far from being a place of comfort or refuge, churches can be a place where judgment, shame, and contempt are felt most acutely. Services in black churches frequently contain a strong mixture of concern for the less fortunate and a call to personal responsibility.”

— Michelle Alexander

126. “As recent data shows, however, much of black progress is a myth. Although some African Americans are doing very well – enrolling in universities and graduate schools at record rates thanks to affirmative action – as a group, in many respects African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and riots swept inner cities across America. The child poverty rate is actually higher today than it was in 1968.”

— Michelle Alexander

127. “The problem is that although race is rarely the sole reason for a stop or search, it is frequently a determinative reason.”

— Michelle Alexander

128. “And despite the unprecedented levels of incarceration in the African American community, the civil rights community is oddly quiet.”

— Michelle Alexander

129. “When given a choice, most people in the ghetto, like anywhere else, would prefer to be able to work, support their families, and live without fear of harm or violence, if given the chance.”

— Michelle Alexander

130. “Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.”

— Michelle Alexander

131. “The term “welfare queen” became a not-so-subtle code for “lazy, greedy, black ghetto mother.” The food stamp program, in turn, was a vehicle to let “some fellow ahead of you buy a T-bone steak,” while “you were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger.”

— Michelle Alexander

132. “Somewhat ironically, these “new Democrats” were joined by virulent racists, most notably the Ku Klux Klan, which announced in 1990 that it intended to “join the battle against illegal drugs” by becoming the “eyes and ears of the police.”

— Michelle Alexander

133. “Although explicitly racial political appeals remained rare, the calls for “war” at a time when the media was saturated with images of black drug crime left little doubt about who the enemy was in the War on Drugs and exactly what he looked like.”

— Michelle Alexander

134. “We should ask ourselves whether efforts to achieve “cosmetic” racial diversity- that is, reform efforts that make institutions look good on the surface without the needed structural changes- have actually helped to facilitate the emergence of mass incarceration and interfered with the development of a more compassionate race consciousness.”

— Michelle Alexander

135. “President Reagan officially announced his administration’s War on Drugs. At the time... less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation. This fact was no deterrent to Reagan, for the drug war from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race.”

— Michelle Alexander

136. “Drug-war forfeiture laws are frequently used to allow those with assets to buy their freedom, while drug users and small-time dealers with few assets to trade are subjected to lengthy prison terms.”

— Michelle Alexander

137. “Prosecutors admit that they routinely charge people with crimes for which they technically have probable cause but which they seriously doubt they could ever win in court.71 They “load up” defendants with charges that carry extremely harsh sentences in order to force them to plead guilty to lesser offenses and – here’s the kicker – to obtain testimony for a related case.”

— Michelle Alexander

138. “Studies have shown that joblessness – not race or black culture – explains the high rates of violent crime in poor black communities.”

— Michelle Alexander

139. “Of all the reasons that we fail to know the truth about mass incarceration, though, one stands out: a profound misunderstanding regarding how racial oppression actually works.”

— Michelle Alexander

140. “Indeed, women who are involved in some relationship with men accused of drug crimes, typically husbands or boyfriends, are among the most frequent claimants in forfeiture proceedings.59 Courts have not been forgiving of women in these circumstances, frequently concluding that “the nature and circumstances of the marital relationship may give rise to an inference of knowledge by the spouse claiming innocent ownership.”60.”

— Michelle Alexander

141. “The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran.”

— Michelle Alexander

142. “As the Justice Policy Institute has observed, “the Clinton Administration’s ‘tough on crime’ policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.”

— Michelle Alexander

143. “Ex-offenders are expected to pay fines and court costs, and submit paperwork to multiple agencies in an effort to win back a right that should never have been taken away in a democracy.”

— Michelle Alexander

144. “This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system. Mass incarceration – not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement – is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement.”

— Michelle Alexander

145. “Many states utilize “poverty penalties” – piling on additional late fees, payment plan fees, and interest when individuals are unable to pay all their debts at once, often enriching private debt collectors in the process.”

— Michelle Alexander

146. “The communities and schools from which they came failed to prepare them for the workforce, and once they have been labeled criminals, their job prospects are forever bleak.”

— Michelle Alexander

147. “Say the following to nearly anyone and watch the reaction: “We really need to do something about the problem of white crime.” Laughter is a likely response.”

— Michelle Alexander

148. “With only a few exceptions, the Supreme Court has seized every opportunity to facilitate the drug war, primarily by eviscerating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the police. The rollback has been so pronounced that some commentators charge that a virtual “drug exception” now exists to the Bill of Rights.”

— Michelle Alexander

149. “A new social consensus must be forged about race and the role of race in defining the basic structure of our society, if we hope ever to abolish the New Jim Crow.”

— Michelle Alexander

150. “Prosecutors admit that they routinely charge people with crimes for which they technically have probable cause but which they seriously doubt they could ever win in court.”

— Michelle Alexander